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Notes: Market Failure: An argument both for and against government (David Friedman)

I just attended the Young American’s for Liberty state convention yesterday in order to hear the venerable David Friedman speak. Below are my notes highlighting the main points of the talk. You may recognize some examples and positions if you’ve been following his work.

Economists studying market failure make legitimate arguments against laisse-faire, but those […]

Notes: International Students for Liberty Conference, Matt Zwolinski, How to Talk About Liberty Without Sounding Like a Jerk

Matt runs the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog. He started off with An Argument:

premise: Libertarianism is True observation: most people don’t belive that. conclude: They are either wrong and evil, or they have never heard of it. given people have heard of it. conclude: Most people are wrong. They either don’t know (stupid) or don’t […]

Notes: International Students for Liberty Conference, David Friedman, Problem of National Defense

Defense without Government ————— – government bad at doing things, esp complex things (ex: legal systems) am willing to accept government solution when alternative is worse – court and police aren’t complicated enough to require government – define National Defense as invasion defense from a neighbor nation – define Public Good as that where […]

Religious Experience

In a piece titled Islam and the Misuses of Ecstasy, Sam Harris takes issue with some atheists about their distance regarding the motivations of religious believers. I, unfortunately, share the perspective that Harris critiques.

I once ran into the anthropologist Scott Atran after he had delivered one of his preening and delusional lectures on […]

Social Game

As a result of some deep procrastination, I’ve been spending far too much time reading junk in the manosphere, which I only recently discovered. These collection of blogs promote topics such as MGTOW (men going their own way), MRA (men’s right activism), and PUA (pick-up artistry). I think most of these guys get recruited into […]

The Absence of Libertarian Countries

Salon has a rousing piece of claptrap provokingly titled The question libertarians just can’t answer. Fortunately, without building up any suspense (which would in this case be correlated with reader annoyance), the author, Michael Lind, comes right out with it:

Why are there no libertarian countries?

Associated with this question, which must be […]

Career Advice from a Successful Autistic

Autistics may be a rare breed, but it it pays off handsomely to try and understand the workings of their minds. In the same way that building and bridge design improves from failures more than successes, neurologists learn more about the brain from examination of breakage whether due to accidental imperfections and handicaps from genetic […]

Distributed Defense

Recently there has been much brouhaha about 3D printed weapons. Mostly these reactions have been media-generated. Cody Wilson, an enterprising young lad has, for the past year, been perfecting the technical artistry behind the manufacture of a working gun printed out of ABS plastic. Before take-down by the bureaucratic late-comer U.S. Department of State, Cody […]

The Commodity Money Myth

Frank Shostak wrote an article about The Bitcoin Money Myth. For an Austrian economist with “over 35 years of experience as a market economist, central bank analyst, and builder of large scale macro-econometric models”[AAS profile], I’m not wholly surprised that he frames his arguments using the commodity theory of money.

Although Shostak does not do […]

Notes: Steps to Expatriation by Ron Yoder

Last weekend (Mar 30th) I took a trip down to a fabulous domicile in Fallbrook, CA to hear Ron Yoder talk about his expatriation to Uruguay. Having already authored an article published through The International Man in 2011, Ron agreed to present information about his transition to a foreign land to the San Diego Casey […]